Research Projects
Literacy Processing and Development
While there is substantial research on literacy development in the L1, the factors impacting literacy development in the L2 remain obfuscated.
Preliminary research indicates that phonological transparency and orthographic accuracy (i.e. orthographic depth) has impacts on literacy acquisition in general, indicating these linguistic features need further exploration within the context of L2 literacy and second-language acquisition.
Additional research is needed to better understand L2 literacy acquisition and both the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that impact learning to read a foreign language and, potentially, a foreign writing system.
Second Language Literacy Development​
While there is substantial research on literacy development in the L1, the factors impacting literacy development in the L2 remain obfuscated.
Preliminary research indicates that phonological transparency and orthographic accuracy (i.e. orthographic depth) has impacts on literacy acquisition in general, indicating these linguistic features need further exploration within the context of L2 literacy and second-language acquisition.
Additional research is needed to better understand L2 literacy acquisition and both the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that impact learning to read a foreign language and, potentially, a foreign writing system.
Orthography Development
Orthography development is a highly complex task, but it is a critical one which can often result in an increased sense of cultural identity. Furthermore, written language is considered a key facet of language revitalization and continued vitality. There are numerous linguistic and non-linguistic factors to consider. From the non-linguistic side, socio-politics is typically the most impactful factor. Community perceptions of the cultures associated with different writing systems combined with political views towards the lingua franca can have drastic impacts on community preferences for orthography.
These complexities, coupled with minimal comprehensive research on orthography development, causes orthography development to be a very difficult and long process for many communities. It is hoped that further research, specifically on linguistic features impacting literacy and orthographic preference, can lead to improved guidelines for communities and scholars engaged in this endeavor.
Grapholinguistic Analysis of Kanji
Among the known scripts of the world, kanji are among the most complex. These characters encode not only phonological information, as most writing systems, but also semantic information. Kanji are more than just pictographs or ideographs and they adhere to a complex system of composition rules. This complex system has not been thoroughly analyzed from a linguistics perspective, which hinders other research involving the orthography. This project has so far yielded a conference poster and paper submission with proposals for frameworks to analyze kanji from a grapholinguistics perspective.